Thursday, 6 December 2007

Okay, Christmas is getting pretty close now, and this is the time that I usually start assessing whether I have enough stocking fillers, so I thought I'd do a little post on some smaller and lower-priced things that physics and maths geeks in particular might like.

Moodicare Colour Changing Alarm ClockI've had one of these for two years now, and I'll honestly never tire of it. It's utterly beautiful, and you can tell the time at night to any necessary accuracy without being able to see the face, simply from the colour. Anyone who wakes up in the night bleary-eyed will wonder how they ever managed without it. See also the Water Powered Alarm Clock

The Best of the Annals of Improbable ResearchThis latest compendium includes a listing of the Ig Nobel prizes, annually awarded "for scientific achievements which cannot or should not be reproduced," and some of the prizewinning papers, such as "Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation" and "Of Mites and Man." There are also plenty of groundbreaking original studies from AIR: "How Dead Is a Doornail?" "Furniture Airbags," and "The Medical Effects of Kissing Boo-Boos."

The Best of MAKE384 pages of the best projects from the first 10 years of MAKE magazine.